Advancement rules are another aspect of roleplaying that sees heavy mechanization. Which I totally get – I agree that games are about what they reward. How these rewards are illustrated, handed out, and utilized, however, has a variety of methods they can be handled with – and like everything else in this series I think you can get away having a fully featured and rich set of rewards without explicitly mechanizing them.
Excuse me for one moment while I descend into game design foolishness, but I think it may help clarify a point. Often when we talk about systems in roleplaying games we talk about the actual rules text. We say stuff like “oh this is a d20 system”, or “this game is in the Basic Role-Play family.” But the rules texts don’t actually do anything – the people at your table do the work. You read the book, you make up characters, you talk in funny voices, you roll the dice (or utilize whatever resolution system you have), and you interpret the results. So really the system is how your table says “ok, this fictional stuff happens”, the rules text is only one part of this.
Ok, so why spend a whole paragraph laboring this point? Its because many gamers become uncomfortable when you talk about removing advancement mechanics, they look at that suggestion and say “well if my character can’t advance or grow or change then what is the game really about? Are we just doing improv theater? Where’s the game?” And on surface level that’s a valid concern, but go back to what a system really is. It’s how your table agrees what happens in the fiction.
So let’s say you’re playing a young knight, and her goal is to become a commander of a retinue of knights, leading atop an awesome griffin mount. Some games may make this a class or have an advancement tree – well you start at squire and you level up a few times using this agreed upon method of accumulating points, you spend those points to option in to the Renowned Knight prestige class and you spend your talents on “Acquire Griffin” and “Leadership.”
Another means could be that you tell your Referee this is your characters goal. You look around the world to hear rumors of where the recluse griffins dwell. You study the temperament of birds and beasts, make your climb of the peaks and befriend a young griffin. You go on adventures, learning the rights and the customs of the Knightly Order you’re climbing the ranks through, doing good deeds and maybe rooting out corruption. Your griffin continues to grow and through hardship and sacrifice you demonstrate your abilities and honor to become elected to the rank of commander amongst your peers.
Or however it works for your table, the important thing is that your character is interacting with the world to get where they want to. Instead of growing because you’re spending points, we see them growing in the fiction of the game, through the descriptions at the table.
So why go to all this means when something like a class structure or talent tree can abstract it away? Especially if you point out that both examples gets to the same end point. The knight becomes a commander and has a griffin. This goes back to our point about rewards – the game is about what it rewards. In our first example maybe you’re leveling up because you get points from slaying monsters, or maybe you grow by demonstrating courage and guile by getting treasure out of tombs. I’m not trying to be reductive here but then your game is probably going to hyper focus on those aspects and the whole character growth will be a by-product.
In the second example the game is that growth. Sure you may slay monster, you may find treasure, but when you’re discussing the fiction of the game it should be very up front what the end goal is about and the fictional steps should serve that. It’s a bottom-up approach where the system is your group laying down the fiction that eventually arrives to your end goal. Instead of figuring out a feat chain or a specific build order and then hashing out whatever conceit is necessary to get your knight to interact with the mechanical constraints your game is using.
So my point is that I think you can get a lot of fun gameplay by handling “advancement” purely through in-fiction interactions and negotiations, specifically interactions that show the character growing, changing, struggling, or developing. A swordsman doesn’t get better at fighting because they get points, they get better because the find a master with a hidden technique or train against progressively dangerous foes.
The next time you want to come up with some snazzy advancement technique, feat tree, or anything else maybe try out just negotiating the steps fictionally, and see how that develops your characters and world.
Thanks for reading, let me know what you think in the comments!
One of the things you get from an advancement system (or any system) is, well, system. You get a set-in-stone set of rules that everyone at the table can look to to see predictable results.
If there is no system for acquiring a griffin, then it is basically up to the GM, which means it’s not predictable from table to table. For some this is a feature! But for others it’s not – being able to predictably acquire a griffin from GM to GM matters.
I definitely don’t think one way or the other is wrong, but I’ve played at tables where acquiring a griffin could happen real early, and tables where it could happen after months of play.
Thanks for the comment! I definitely agree, it will depend on your play culture. Mechanics are a good way to kind of set onto paper something that operates as part of the social contract. If you know you need 1,000gp to get your new sword then you have a clearer picture about when that would be.
I am not trying to be dismissive, but why maybe I care less about that nowadays is two-fold:
One, I think every table, even with a fairly mechanized system advancement will still be dependent on the play culture anyway. I have been at tables of Apocalypse World where the dice get rolled at least once a scene, and I have been at tables where the dice get rolled maybe once or twice a session. So I agree that reward mechanics do put things down into stone, you still have to engage with the play culture to interpret that. When do you get xp for gold (retrieval, on spend, from any source or just dungeons and what even is a dungeon)? What is a “large challenge”, when is a goal actually satisfied? Many mechanized reward structures will need either direct interpretations of when they trigger, or interpretations of the play culture around them (such as frequency of rolls or just how much conflict in AW).
The second is that I think roleplaying has developed to a place where enough people are comfortable handling the social stuff on a social level. Your mileage may vary, but I no longer find a need to really mechanize authority. If the griffin example is taking too long, maybe chat about expectations with your ref. Say “hey I’ve been a squire for like three months now… could we move this along?” You still have this issue with traditional reward mechanisms – some tables are “monty hauls” when it comes to treasure allocation, and some penniless grinds. And I think the solution in both cases is to talk it out with your table.
I think that’s a long winded way of saying – I agree with your assessment, but to me I think its still worth discussing advancement and focusing on the fiction. If you find thats not to your taste then obviously there’s a million systems each with their own progression mechanics.
“The second is that I think roleplaying has developed to a place where enough people are comfortable handling the social stuff on a social level. Your mileage may vary, but I no longer find a need to really mechanize authority.”
Lucky you then. 🙂 My heart is with FKR, but these kind of games are unplayable for me, as in every group I GM there seems to be at least one player bent on challenging my every judgement and rigid rules (not necessarily complicated, but rigid), help to stave such people off.
“A swordsman doesn’t get better at fighting because they get points, they get better because they find a master with a hidden technique or train against progressively dangerous foes.”
I really like this idea – but – if there are no actual “points” to show actual improvement within the rules, how does the swordsman actually get any better? If a swordsman goes from +1 to +2 to +3…there’s concrete improvement and it impacts the rules. But, just saying “now you’re a master swordsman” doesn’t really change anything. Or at least, I can’t see it.
Thanks for the post. I write a little bit about this in a post where I discuss the development of my own personal house system here, and I am probably going to make one of these kinds of posts for conflict resolution system, but here’s kind of a short summary of how I handle it:
I don’t express someone being a master vs. amateur through modifiers or any sort of mechanics. Much like the rest of this series I instead remove these things. A master fencer in the fiction is able to have greater impacts while having greater threats. So someone who is highly trained will probably not risk death when challenged by a single significantly less-skilled opponent (that is, unless this opponent can change the situation in their favor), additionally the master probably has significant say on whether they slay their opponent or not. Likewise the master is able to utilize tactics and abilities with much greater ease.
So saying “now you’re a master swordsman” doesn’t change anything mechanically, but what it changes is our understanding of the fiction and how we contextualize the events that occur therein. It goes back to that image Chris McDowall put in a post on similar topic – an octopus isn’t hard to grapple because it has some bonus modifier, its because it has 8 arms and and is an invertebrate.
Oh and I wanted to briefly mention, despite what I say above, I’m not necessarily against mechanics. If your game encodes fighters as getting better by adding +1 or whatever and thats what you enjoy – use that. I’m mostly speaking from a standpoint that if you feel like reward mechanisms are too abstract, making players game the ruleset instead of the world, and going contrary to your fiction – then instead of considering adding additional reward mechanisms to only “reward” them when its fictionally obvious that a reward has been achieved.
I feel like this compares well with the way skill systems are typically implemented in RPGs. You level up, place x points into Locksmith, and suddenly you are much better at picking locks–even if you haven’t picked a single lock since your last level-up.
I like your idea here, and I think it can even dovetail nicely with the mechanics of your game of choice with a little thought and work. I need to give this some thought.
In games like Burning Wheel and Torchbearer – the level system of which is relatively unimportant – improvement in skills is really organic, responding to both success and failure in challenges in the game. A character’s path and choices will directly influence how she develops and everyone notices this at the table.
I really like the FKR philosophy but there is a tension here with brilliant rules systems which help us make good stories with good character arcs.
I don’t think there’s a tension here – its what works best for your table. I find that an FKR approach feels more organic to me and lets us focus on the kind of game we want without worrying to much about needing to play a system. Where something like Burning Wheel excels is that its mechanical foundation steers the game to be about the thing it does well.
I can tell the exact same kinds of stories I can tell with Burning Wheel as I can with an FKR approach. Granted I have a lot of experience with both, so mileages may vary. If you find that BW guides your table towards the kind of game you want – awesome. Maybe FKR is too loose for your table. But by the same regard, perhaps BW calls too often to the character sheet – the division of kinds of Artha, the specific mechanizations of traits, the requirement of certain classes of tests, etc. I’ve found that these things sometimes helps people to get where they are going, but I have also found some players where this provides a distraction.
Whatever works best for your table is what I recommend, I just suggest defaulting to starting with less and building up than starting from a hefty middle-ground and adding from the start.